Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 1 September 2024.

Ah, Jew-spotting!—a pastime beloved equally to antisemites and Jews. If you see someone constantly updating their social media feed with lists of famous or influential people that you might not have known are Jewish, then that someone could be the late and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving, but it could just as easily be the late and infamous (in your family) gefilte chef and tipsy hora dancer Uncle Irving.

My point isn’t that these Twin Irvings are equivalent. To the contrary—if you take up Jew-spotting, your motivations and intentions matter. David Irving and Uncle Irving might share the very same list of Jews to their Facebook feeds, with identical wording (“Tiffany Hadish—Jew! Alejandro Mayorkas—Jew!”) and both posts will have the same denotations, but David Irving’s overall career lends his list a connotation that the Jews in question are sinister, whereas, in his own context, Uncle Irving is clearly shepping nakhes. Luckily, the Twin Irvings do not define the only types of Jew-spotter—good news, because antisemitic rants and the blustery shepping of nakhes are both genres that tend (for most of us) toward the tiresome.

All this is to say that before I had even opened Daniel Schulman’s The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America—and I opened it during a surge in global antisemitism which occurred after the book had already been published—the first thing I wanted to know was: Why this topic? One could write a history of bankers; one could write a history of Jews. But a history of Jewish bankers? David Irving and Uncle Irving would both be thrilled, I’m sure, but during such a true renaissance of the art of antisemitism as we see in full flower today, is that reason enough?…